Sound and Silence
by Battery Bug
Summary: AU. "...and he is quite sure that nothing is real any more." Soldier!Dean, Veteran!Dean. PTSD. Open ending. Technically set between season 5 and 6 (but still, you now, AU).
Xxxxx, xxx xx xxxx xxxxxx, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,  
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

(T.S. Eliot, _The Waste Land_ )

#

It is a beech wood. Row upon row of trees standing tall and proud. Standing at attention. There is a part of him that thinks this is what offers him serenity, not the silence, not the solitude, but the sheer familiarity of order. Not that _order_ has been predominant for the last eight months of his life. Fighting is not orderly; there is no system to war when you travel on foot. No bigger picture is visible from the ground when you are struggling, not to win the war, not to take the town, but simply with no choice, from street to street to street. The streets are like trenches, but the walls around you do not offer protection from shells; they offer high ground and conveniently blank windows to enemy snipers.

He lost a brother like that. Before the first month was out.

There was a time, _before,_ where order was a much bigger part of his life. When everything was preparation and drills and standing at attention. But that was before _then_.

Words trouble him now. When he was _there_ , _before_ was simple. Before was home. Before was Ben and Lisa, their house and their picket-fence garden. Before was routine days and grocery shopping and taking the boy to football practice. Before was peace, and before was back home. But then _there_ became _here_ , and the foreign country, the screams and curses in a language he never understood, and the burning sun was real. And home and peace and love seemed false.

He has taken to wonder if that is the problem. With the words, and the war, and the world. Then or now. Here or there. True or false. Everything is beautifully divided into binary oppositions and there is no room for the third option. Everyone works with an idea of black and white.

(His military uniform is a light charcoal.)

These days his world is tripartite. Only, it is rather hard for him to sort it that way in his head, when he only ever gets two words. There was then-home, and war-then and now-home and those two _thens_ seem almost as different as the two _homes_. There was back before it all when one thing was real and then that became surreal and the war became real and now he is back, and he is quite sure that _nothing_ is real any more.

When he gets to that point he stops.

Sometimes he wants to go back. Maybe he is naïve, but a little part of him thinks that the war and the danger and the destruction is constant. Then there will be that and he can slot the rest, _this_ , into a space together with _before_ to be _everything else_. He can put his world back into a binary box, the way the two halves of his brain want it to be.

And even if war does change, he will at least have four versions of non-reality to work with and he knows that that is better. His reality right now is a sharp-edged prime number with no positive divisors but one, and one will never work again. One means _whole_ and its homophone makes much more sense with regard to his life now.

Lisa wants to go to the mall. He got combat pay, and it is almost a part of your duty to spend it. Fight back terrorists and dictatorships with the common ideology of the West: consumerism. That is how the war is won.

The mall is a miniature town in itself, full of street-like corridors and walls of store fronts with windows which are really entire glass façades (and there is movement and there is noise and there are little screens advertising big screens and sound systems and cars and dental floss) and his breath speeds up.

He remembers moving through desolate streets silently. He remembers being a part of a whole (not the _whole_ of the one that was his life before, but still a whole) and they would all look out for each other, everyone knowing exactly what they were looking at. He would look at the windows in street-height and he would not have to worry about those above or what was behind him or even in front of him. One thing to look at. Just one direction for his vision and as a whole they were an omniscient being.

But most of the days the streets were empty. Even on the days with snipers, the _streets_ were empty.

(The corridors of the shopping mall are full of people.)

Once he went through a street littered with debris: piles of bricks and chunks of walls as tall as men. It was hard to navigate and the creature split into just him and his brothers and they were so alone next to each other.

Outside the sun breaks through the clouds and light filters in through the glass panes in the roof turning the entire row of shining store fronts into a wall of reflective windows and his breathing stops altogether . It is a wall of impenetrable light and he cannot watch it all, for he is alone and there are people everywhere and he cannot breathe and he is alone and then there is a hand on his wrist, and Lisa is right there with him.

She leads him to the car and puts him in the passenger seat. By the time they pull out of the parking lot he has enough oxygen in his brain to know it is a good thing; his breath is still shallow enough to tell him that he would not be able to keep below the speed limit, because he really needs to get away from the streets of the war zone and also from the mall.

He never knows if they actually bought anything.

(There is something else he does not know.)

He plays football with Ben in the garden and promises to take him to practice next time.

The middle-aged couple down the road celebrate their silver wedding anniversary with a garden party. He goes with Ben and Lisa. He smiles and chats with his neighbour.

Did Lisa tell him their cellar flooded this spring? Does he think the weather is going to hold? How is Ben doing at school? Are they going anywhere over the holiday?

He answers, but he is not sure he knows the answers.

Nobody seems to mind when he excuses himself early. He tells Lisa to stay and enjoy the evening. He is just tired, it is nothing, he is not really used to this kind of gatherings, to all these people, and yes, he will be fine on his own. Go to bed early. Tomorrow is another day.

He has not been back for long, has only just gotten into bed (has only just fallen asleep), when the fireworks go off. There are explosions and flashes of light and suddenly there is also debris raining down around him and his head is cushioned against a crumbled wall of someone's home and the blanket twined around his torso is the dead weight of one of his brothers holding him down, restraining him, choking him, for what right has he got to breathe? He left three of his brothers behind, _there_ , what right can he possibly have to breathe?

When Lisa comes in a little later he is still breathing. He is also awake and she tells him of the fireworks, tells him of the beauty of the flaring colours and the grins on the children's faces. When she gets into bed he holds her close and listens to the dull thumping of her heartbeat.

Hours later when the second round of firework goes off, he almost ends that heartbeat.

When he snaps out of it and the pyrotechnics are once more reduced to what they are – elaborate light shows passing off man-made destruction as beauty – she lets him settle against her again. He is not sure he deserves that.

The following days Lisa wears a thin scarf of autumn oranges around her neck. She does not mention the fireworks. When the scarf slips its colours contrast with the dark patches of her bruised skin and she smiles.

It is not his fault, it is okay, he is going to be okay. It is all going to be okay.

(She smiles as she lies.)

He does not deserve that.

He stands next to the field, watching the boys run and shout and run. (The last time he saw boys running, they were screaming.)

He wonders if chasing or being chased is worse.

(He has seen children chase other things than footballs. He has lived in a world where a boy taking a shot had nothing to do with his kicking a ball.)

( _Nothing_ feels real any more.)

He walks the woods almost every day now. He can almost hear the whispers over the loud silence. Perhaps it is the wind through the treetops. Perhaps it is the sighs of those without a breath. He left his brothers behind.

(What right does he have to breathe?)

He is alone.

(There is not enough oxygen in the air these days.)

There is either silence or sound. He has looked for a third to that pair, too, but the empty woods still offer no answers.

If a shot rings out in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it still make a sound?


End file.
